Throughout a lifetime spent working with and loving animals, Caolaidhe Keelor has built relationships with some of the most unlikely of creatures — from vultures and rats to turtles and crows.
Living in Kendal near the Ganaraska Forest, Caolaidhe (pronounced Cailey) is a wildlife educator, conservationist, artist, and content creator with more than 37,000 Instagram followers and close to half a million TikTok likes.
She’s the kind of person who talks about birds at a party, who stops to admire and photograph moths, and who spends her free time cleaning turtle enclosures. It’s clear that Caolaidhe’s passion for animals of all kinds, from the largest birds to the tiniest insects, runs deep in her veins and she doesn’t take for granted the pleasure of having built a life around them.
“I never in my wildest dreams imagined growing up that I would now be an adult who gets to work with animals,” she says. “Little Caolaidhe is quite proud of big Caolaidhe for getting to work with animals.”
Caolaidhe was just five years old, growing up in Alberta, when a nature centre brought a great horned owl into her classroom and incited her lifelong love of birds and, especially, birds of prey.
“It’s a big bird to begin with, but when I was five, that was a gigantic bird and it just had these giant yellow eyes that really took me in,” she says. “It was just so fascinating, and I just thought this little creature was so cute, even though it was an apex predator.”
Though from the young age, Caolaidhe thought she wanted to be a veterinarian, the “traumatizing” death of a goldfish put a quick end to that dream. But she did follow her passion and her first professional job with animals was managing a dog clothing store in Vancouver.
Already always dressing up her Pekingese Scotty in clothes — before Paris Hilton made it cool, she says — she launched her own tongue-in-cheek dog clothing line. The collection even made it to the small screen, being admired by the women in an episode of The Real Housewives of Vancouver.
“My pets are like my children, and I enjoy dressing them up,” she says. “Even to this day, my border collie and I wear matching outfits, and we’ll have a little photo shoot.”
In 2017, Caolaidhe took the falconry program at Pacific Northwest Raptors which she says definitely changed her life and put her on the trajectory of working with animals and doing conservation work. She would go to airports to fly the raptors and scare ducks and geese off the runways or fly them at landfills and deter the gulls.
“These birds have possibly saved lives,” she says. “They have very important jobs, so that was an amazing experience for me. Also, when you’re working one-on-one with a bird, the relationship you form with that animal is like no other.”
Spending so much time in landfills had her thinking more about the roles animals play in environmental conservation and how the environment affects them in return.
“I would see how much garbage (was thrown away) and what people throw out and what people don’t recycle,” Caolaidhe says. “I think when people throw out garbage, they don’t realize that it actually goes somewhere else — it doesn’t just disappear — so that was very eye-opening for me to see that there can be change made to the environment. And working with animals who are so closely involved with the environment really goes hand in hand.”
At the falconry, she also hosted flying demonstrations which she loved because not only were people so “in awe” of the birds, but she says, “the more you know about a species, the more you want to protect it.”
Not only did she open eyes to the magnificence of the birds of prey, but she offered people practical ways they could protect them. Caolaidhe particularly liked changing the stigma around vultures, one of her favourite species, that often gets a bad reputation.
To explain how important the species is to the ecosystem, Caolaidhe likes to share the story about the decline in vultures in India.
More than 20 years ago, vultures were dying at high rates because of a drug being used to treat sick cows that the vultures would then feast on. This decline led to an increase in human rabies cases and deaths because of the spread of the disease and bacteria that the scavenger birds would have otherwise removed from the environment.
“They realized that when the vultures would eat carrion that has rabies, because the acidity in the vulture’s stomach is equivalent to that of battery acid, it would kill the pathogens,” Caolaidhe explains. “Vultures are just super important to the environment, so I wish they wouldn’t get such a bad rep. And I think they’re adorable — their little bald heads are so beautiful.”
Caolaidhe says she definitely thinks the more she shared stories like this about the birds, the more she felt she was connecting with people.
“Vultures are a hard one for people to appreciate but I do think the more stories that we share, the more appreciation there is,” she says. “I think slowly there is hope for them to get the love they deserve.”
Birds of prey even helped Caolaidhe in her personal life and made an impression on her now-husband Greg Keelor of the Canadian roots-rock band Blue Rodeo. The first time they met through mutual friends, she invited Greg to a flying demonstration she was doing on Grouse Mountain the following day. There, she introduced him to her co-worker Hercules the Bald Eagle who she says was the “matchmaker,” and the rest is history.
Upon moving with Greg to Kendal, where they now reside on a farm, Caolaidhe began working with animals in a different capacity — this time for TV films. In addition to landing some roles as a background extra — and even giving her cat, Gigi, a cameo in the CBC TV series Murdoch Mysteries — she got to interact with and develop even more appreciation for creatures who are often overlooked, like a 16-foot python, cockroaches, and rats.
“(Rats) are actually extremely smart and affectionate and they’re very easy to train,” she says. “They want affection, and they want the reward they get for doing something good. That’s always fun to tell people because they’re another species that get a very bad rep, but they’re very sweet.”
To share her love of nature and animals, she began “Birder She Wrote,” a website, social media following, and community where she shares stories and photos of her work with the birds of prey, the animals she worked with in films, and all the different beings she connects with throughout her life.
Part of the content involves filming the “Birder She Wrote” show where she and her sous-chefs, cat Gigi and dog Sam, team up to make pet treats and household products — often in matching outfits.
“It’s just been so fun,” Caolaidhe says. “Playing with animals is just the most fun anyone can ever have.”
Her affection for the animal kingdom is not only limited to birds and mammals either. For the past year, Caolaidhe has been volunteering with the Ontario Turtle Conservation Centre in Peterborough, cleaning out their enclosures while doing her part to raise awareness for Ontario’s at-risk turtle species — including organizing a conservation awareness event at the centre in September that saw her musician friends Melissa Payne and Terra Lightfoot perform along with her husband Greg.
“I love my afternoons going in and cleaning and it’s such a great opportunity to get closer to turtles,” she says. “Volunteer work is such a rewarding job and working with animals is such a rewarding job. I love putting them back in their fresh water and seeing them swim about. It’s very meditative, just me and the turtle.”
Though she has worked with a wide range of animals and has had her own pets throughout her life, one of the most special relationships she holds dearest to her heart was the lifechanging friendship she developed with a crow named Darling.
VIDEO: “The crow that lived like no other”
After Caolaidhe moved the crow’s nest to safety when it was just a fledgling, Darling formed an unbreakable bond with Caolaidhe as well as her dog Sam and cat Gigi.
“She would tap on our windows every morning to wake us up and we would go for walks with her. In all my lifetime, I don’t think there’ll ever be a moment that is greater than my time I shared with Darling. Being friends with a crow is really being introduced to a different dimension. Even working with animals so long, I can’t explain it, because the interspecies connectedness that my dog, my cat, and my crow had was incredible.”
Unfortunately, in November 2022, a few years after they built their friendship, Darling didn’t show up one morning and they never saw her again. Caolaidhe, who believes she was killed by a bird of prey, is hoping to “honour” Darling by one day writing a children’s book about their friendship as a story of acceptance.
“Crows are much smarter than we could ever give them credit for,” Caolaidhe says. “It was the most remarkable experience of my life and when she died, it was the most tragic experience of my life as well, but it was also very life changing. My life will never be the same after befriending Darling.”
“Something she made me realize is the impermanence of all things, and you just never know when it’s going to end. Her friendship made me realize to be grateful for the moment and living in the moment, because you can never take it for granted.”
To learn more about Caolaidhe Keelor’s work, visit www.birdershewrote.com or follow Birder She Wrote on Instagram and TikTok.
